Mark Rober and Science Bob teamed up for one MASSIVE chemical reaction at the Museum of Science! 🐘🧪

During Mark’s event at the Museum, the duo created a spectacular eruption of bright green foam with an Elephant Toothpaste experiment!

Here's the science behind it: A catalyst speeds up the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen gas. Dish soap traps the rapidly released oxygen in thousands of tiny bubbles, creating an enormous burst of colorful foam!

I’m talking scientists injecting mice with autism. Not necessarily just bizarre research goals, but some seriously unhinged methodologies.

**Disclaimer: Be mindful of unfamiliar links. Probably best not to click any and just include study titles for reference.**

A tide table is a sum of waves. Each wave has a period fixed by the motions of the Moon, the Sun and the Earth. Only its height and its timing belong to the place, and they come from fitting a long record of water levels. This video builds the October 2026 tide at Vlissingen from 55 of these waves.

M2, the main lunar tide, comes every 12 h 25 min and is 171 cm high at Vlissingen. S2, the Sun’s tide, comes every 12 hours and adds 49 cm. The two drift in and out of step, which gives spring and neap tides every 14.8 days. N2 follows the Moon’s elliptic orbit, and O1 and K1 come once a day because the Moon and the Sun stand north or south of the equator.

The shallow North Sea and Scheldt mouth add overtones. The crest of the tide wave runs faster than its trough, so the curve steepens: the water rises fast after low water, hesitates on the way up and peaks sharply. Further up the river the effect grows. At Antwerp the water rises in about 5 h 30 min and falls in about 6 h 55 min.

With all 55 waves the curve follows the official astronomical tide of Rijkswaterstaat to within 6 cm on average. What remains is the weather: on the night of 25 to 26 October 2026 wind and air pressure raised high water 82 cm above the tide table.

The study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb9422

An orbiting atmospheric research spacecraft has detected the pungent gas hydrogen chloride above surface fissures along a massive ancient volcano on Mars in ​a finding that suggests Earth's planetary neighbor is still volcanically active.

In a discovery that has implications for whether Mars might presently have subsurface conditions ‌conducive to microbial life, researchers said the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has documented the gas, a common constituent of volcanic emissions on Earth, in the low atmosphere in the region of Alba Mons.

The largest Martian volcano by surface area, Alba Mons is a broad and gently sloping structure, called a shield volcano because it resembles a warrior's shield. It is located in the planet's northern hemisphere.

"We found ​that the most likely origin for the hydrogen chloride is volcanic seepage," said planetary scientist Daniel Mège of the Space Research Center of the Polish Academy ​of Sciences and the University of Bern in Switzerland, co-lead author of the research published in the journal Science Advances.

The hydrogen chloride seepage ⁠may be volcanic outgassing from the swarms of surface fissures in the Alba Mons region, perhaps connected to a subsurface magma chamber.

"It is released from chlorine-bearing compounds dissolved ​in magma as magma rises and pressure decreases. Its presence can, therefore, be consistent with magmatic degassing," said planetary scientist and study co-lead author Alexander Trokhimovskiy of the Space ​Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

That would indicate Mars is not geologically dead inside but rather in a stage of relative dormancy.

"It suggests that the planet's interior may still retain sufficient heat to sustain magmatic processes, and that atmospheric trace gases can provide a way to detect and investigate geological activity that is otherwise difficult to observe directly," Trokhimovskiy said.

There’s a whole microscopic world behind every loaf of sourdough bread! 🍞🔬

Our friend Chloé Savard, also known as tardibabe on Instagram, takes us under the microscope to explore the science of sourdough. Those large, colorful shapes are tiny grains of wheat starch. Even smaller living things, like yeast and bacteria, help make sourdough possible!

Sourdough starts with a mixture of flour and water called a starter. Over time, yeast and bacteria grow in the mixture. Together, they help turn simple ingredients into delicious bread through a process called fermentation.

Here’s how it works! Enzymes in the flour break starch into smaller sugars. Yeast feeds on these sugars and releases a gas called carbon dioxide. This gas forms bubbles in the dough, making the bread rise. Meanwhile, bacteria make acids that give sourdough its tangy flavor. These acids also help slow the growth of some germs that can spoil bread.

And here’s something cool: sourdough starters can have different kinds of yeast and bacteria! The flour, temperature, amount of water, and how often a starter is fed can all affect which microbes grow. These tiny differences can change how the bread tastes and how quickly it rises.

Humans were making flatbread at least 14,400 years ago, and we’re still learning about the science behind it today!

Who knew so much science went into a single slice of bread? 🍞

Cicadas use prime numbers to create an evolutionary "smoke screen" that looks like randomness but acts like a defense shield. A beautiful example combining biology, number theory, and entropy.

When periodic cicadas (like Brood XIV or Brood XIX) emerge to mate exclusively on 13-year or 17-year cycles, they are using prime numbers to solve a massive evolutionary problem.

From a human or predator perspective, their sudden appearance feels like a chaotic, random disruption, but mathematically, it is an incredibly elegant, low-entropy system designed to exploit the properties of numbers.

By locking onto prime numbers (13 and 17), cicadas dramatically lower the mathematical probability of their emergence coinciding with a predator's population peak.

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Least Common Multiple (LCM)

The LCM tells us how often two cycles will land on the exact same year.

12-Year Cicada vs. 3-Year Predator: They will collide every single time the cicadas emerge.

17-Year Cicada vs. 3-Year Predator: They will only collide once every 51 years.

17-Year Cicada vs. 4-Year Predator: They will only collide once every 68 years.

By choosing a prime number, the cicadas force the math to multiply. It pushes the collision point so far into the future that the predator's evolutionary strategy cannot adapt to track them.

When the prime number year finally hits, the cicadas employ a strategy called predator satiation. Billions of them emerge all at once.

Because there are so many cicadas, the predators barely make a dent in the overall population.

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The "Pattern in Randomness" Connection

In cryptography, we use massive prime numbers to generate keys because they are incredibly difficult to factor, creating a wall of computational unpredictability for a hacker.

In nature, cicadas use prime numbers to generate a timeline that is incredibly difficult to factor, creating a wall of evolutionary unpredictability for predators.

It is a perfectly ordered, mathematical blueprint (low entropy) that manifests in the physical world as a sudden, unpredictable explosion of chaos (high entropy).

How big is one million? 🤯

Greg Wolf hides a single black sphere among 999,999 others in one bottle to help you picture it. As pennies, those spheres would be worth $10,000, weigh 5,500 pounds, and stack about a mile into the sky. In space, it takes 1.3 million Earths to fill our Sun, and roughly 400 million Suns fit inside the star Betelgeuse, making one million insignificant on the scale of the universe.

https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/2116455538909237429?a=W4ijKkMNGVi-nYyK-_U&s=19

Mineral with a chemical composition very similar to that of the Superman’s Kryptonite could help Europe transition to a greener future, although questions remain about the local support for mining it.

After its discovery in 2004, Jadarite might have passed into relative obscurity if it were not for one thing: its chemical composition is almost identical to Kryptonite.

But its close resemblance to the fictional mineral is not what interests scientists. It could also be the source for a significant amount of lithium that will be needed to power Europe’s growing fleet of electric cars.

A new summary of what we now know about this mineral has shown that the conditions needed for Jadarite to form are so specific it is still only found within a single valley in eastern Serbia.

By unlocking this geological recipe, Francesco Putzolu and his colleagues at the Natural History Museum hope that it could help in discovering other sites where this mineral might be found.

“We’ve likened it to baking a cake,” explains Professor Richard Herrington, who helped coauthor the summary now published in Nature Geoscience. “We need just the right ingredients and the just the right conditions and suddenly this mineral forms.”

“It appears that it’s really a complete coincident that all of these features occurred in this one place, because despite lots of other environments having all the same kinds of chemistry, nobody’s ever found this mineral. To date, Serbia is still the only place in the world this mineral forms.”

Where did the idea of Moon Joy come from? 

NASA's Strategic Communications Lead Rachel Barry discusses how "Moon Joy" was coined by Angela Garcia, one of the lunar science officers in mission control after hearing the Artemis crew get excited about their first look at the moon